On the last night of his life he heard a noise like a giant crushing a forest beneath his feet, and smelled a stench like the giant’s fart, and he realized that the tree was burning. He got out of his chair and staggered dizzily down to the garden to watch the fire, whose flames were consuming histories, memories, genealogies, purifying the earth, and coming towards him to set him free; – because the wind was blowing the fire towards the grounds of the mansion, so soon enough, soon enough, it would be his turn. He saw the tree explode into a thousand fragments, and the trunk crack, like a heart; then he turned away and reeled towards the place in the garden where Ayesha had first caught his eye; – and now he felt a slowness come upon him, a great heaviness, and he lay down on the withered dust. Before his eyes closed he felt something brushing at his lips, and saw the little cluster of butterflies struggling to enter his mouth. Then the sea poured over him, and he was in the water beside Ayesha, who had stepped miraculously out of his wife’s body … ‘Open,’ she was crying. ‘Open wide!’ Tentacles of light were flowing from her navel and he chopped at them, chopped, using the side of his hand. ‘Open,’ she screamed. ‘You’ve come this far, now do the rest.’ – How could he hear her voice? – They were under water, lost in the roaring of the sea, but he could hear her clearly, they could all hear her, that voice like a bell. ‘Open,’ she said. He closed.
He was a fortress with clanging gates. – He was drowning. – She was drowning, too. He saw the water fill her mouth, heard it begin to gurgle into her lungs. Then something within him refused that, made a different choice, and at the instant that his heart broke, he opened.
His body split apart from his adam’s-apple to his groin, so that she could reach deep within him, and now she was open, they all were, and at the moment of their opening the waters parted, and they walked to Mecca across the bed of the Arabian Sea.
1
Eighteen months after his heart attack, Saladin Chamcha took to the air again in response to the telegraphed news that his father was in the terminal stages of multiple myeloma, a systemic cancer of the bone marrow that was ‘one hundred per cent fatal’, as Chamcha’s GP unsentimentally put it when he telephoned her to check. There had been no real contact between father and son since Changez Chamchawala sent Saladin the proceeds from his felled walnut-tree all those eternities ago. Saladin had sent a brief note reporting that he had survived the Bostan disaster, and had been sent an even terser missive in return: ‘Rec.’d yr. communication. This information already to hand.’ When the bad news telegram arrived, however – the signatory was the unknown second wife, Nasreen II, and the tone was pretty unvarnished: FATHER GOING FAST + IF DESIROUS OF SEEING BETTER MOVE IT + N CHAMCHAWALA (MRS) – he discovered to his surprise that after a lifetime of tangled relationships with his father, after long years of crossed wires and ‘irrevocable sunderings’, he was once again capable of an uncomplicated reaction. Simply, overwhelmingly, it was imperative that he reach Bombay before Changez left it for good.
He spent the best part of a day first standing in the visa queue at the consular section of India House, and then trying to persuade a jaded official of the urgency of his application. He had stupidly forgotten to bring the telegram, and was told, as a result, that ‘it is issue of proof. You see, anybody could come and tell that their father is dying, isn’t it? In order to expedite.’ Chamcha fought to restrain his anger, but finally burst. ‘Do I look like a Khalistan zealot to you?’ The official shrugged. ‘I’ll tell you who I am,’ Chamcha bellowed, incensed by that shrug, ‘I’m the poor bastard who got blown up by terrorists, fell thirty thousand feet out of the sky because of terrorists, and now because of those same terrorists I have to be insulted by pen-pushers like you.’ His visa application, placed firmly at the bottom of a large pile by his adversary, was not granted until three days later. The first available flight was thirty-six hours after that: and it was an Air India 747, and its name was Gulistan.
Gulistan and Bostan, the twin gardens of Paradise – one blew apart, and then there was one … Chamcha, moving down one of the drains through which Terminal Three dripped passengers into aircraft, saw the name painted next to the 747’s open door, and turned a couple of shades paler. Then he heard the sari-clad Indian stewardess greeting him in an unmistakably Canadian accent, and lost his nerve, spinning away from the plane in a reflex of straightforward terror. As he stood there, facing the irritable throng of passengers waiting to board, he was conscious of how absurd he must look, with his brown leather holdall in one hand, two zippered suit-hanger bags in the other, and his eyes out on stalks; but for a long moment he was entirely unable to move. The crowd grew restive; if this is an artery, he found himself thinking, then I’m the blasted clot. ‘I used to chichi chicken out also,’ said a cheerful voice. ‘But now I’ve got the titrick. I fafa flap my hands during tatake-off and the plane always mama makes it into the isk isk isky.’
‘Today the top gogo goddess is absolutely Lakshmi,’ Sisodia confided over whisky once they were safely aloft. (He had been as good as his word, flapping his arms wildly as Gulistan rushed down the runway, and afterwards settled back contentedly in his seat, beaming modestly. ‘Wowoworks every time.’ They were both travelling in the 747’s upper deck, reserved for business class non-smokers, and Sisodia had moved into the empty seat next to Chamcha like air filling a vacuum. ‘Call me Whisky,’ he insisted. ‘What lie lie line are you in? How mum much do you earn? How long you bibi been away? You know any women in town, or you want heh heh help?’) Chamcha closed his eyes and fixed his thoughts on his father. The saddest thing, he realized, was that he could not remember a single happy day with Changez in his entire life as a man. And the most gladdening thing was the discovery that even the unforgivable crime of being one’s father could be forgiven, after all, in the end. Hang on, he pleaded silently. I’m coming as fast as I can. ‘In these hihighly material times,’ Sisodia explained, ‘who else but goddess of wewealth? In Bombay the young businessmen are hoho holding all night poopoo pooja parties. Statue of Lakshmi presides, with hands tuturned out, and lightbulbs running down her fifi fingers, lighting in sequence, you get me, as if the wealth is paw paw pouring down her palms.’ On the cabin’s movie screen a stewardess was demonstrating the various safety procedures. In a corner of the screen an inset male figure translated her into sign language. This was progress, Chamcha recognized. Film instead of human beings, a small increase in sophistication (the signing) and a large increase in cost. High technology at the service, ostensibly, of safety; while in reality air travel got daily more dangerous, the world’s stock of aircraft was ageing and nobody could afford to renew it. Bits fell off planes every day, or so it seemed, and collisions and near-misses were also on the up. So the film was a kind of lie, because by existing it said: Observe the lengths we’ll go to for your security. We’ll even make you a movie about it. Style instead of substance, the image instead of the reality … ‘I’m planning a big bubudget picture about her,’ Sisodia said. ‘This is in strictest coco confidence. Maybe a Sridevi weewee wehicle, I hohope so. Now that Gibreel’s comeback is flaw flaw flopping, she is number one supreme.’
Chamcha had heard that Gibreel Farishta had hit the comeback trail. His first film, The Parting of the Arabian Sea, had bombed badly; the special effects looked home-made, the girl in the central Ayesha role, a certain Pimple Billimoria, had been woefully inadequate, and Gibreel’s own portrayal of the archangel had struck many critics as narcissistic and megalomaniac. The days when he could do no wrong were gone; his second feature, Mahound, had hit every imaginable religious reef, and sunk without trace. ‘You see, he chochose to go with other producers,’ Sisodia lamented. ‘The greegreed of the ista ista istar. With me the if if effects always work and the good tataste also you can take for gug, grunt, granted.’ Saladin Chamcha closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. He had drunk his whisky too fast on account of his fear of flying, and his head had begun to spin. Sisodia appeared not to recall his past connection to Faris
hta, which was fine. That was where the connection belonged: in the past. ‘Shh shh Sridevi as Lakshmi,’ Sisodia sang out, not very confidentially. ‘Now that is sosolid gold. You are an ack actor. You should work back hohome. Call me. Maybe we can do bubusiness. This picture: solid pap pap platinum.’
Chamcha’s head whirled. What strange meanings words were taking on. Only a few days ago that back home would have rung false. But now his father was dying and old emotions were sending tentacles out to grasp him. Maybe his tongue was twisting again, sending his accent East along with the rest of him. He hardly dared open his mouth.
Almost twenty years earlier, when the young and newly renamed Saladin was scratching a living on the margins of the London theatre, in order to maintain a safe distance from his father; and when Changez was retreating in other ways, becoming both reclusive and religious; back then, one day, out of the blue, the father had written to the son, offering him a house. The property was a rambling mansion in the hill-station of Solan. ‘The first property I ever owned,’ Changez wrote, ‘and so it is the first I am gifting to you.’ Saladin’s instant reaction was to see the offer as a snare, a way of rejoining him to home, to the webs of his father’s power; and when he learned that the Solan property had long ago been requisitioned by the Indian Government in return for a peppercorn rent, and that it had for many years been occupied by a boys’ school, the gift stood revealed as a delusion as well. What did Chamcha care if the school were willing to treat him, on any visits he cared to make, as a visiting Head of State, putting on march-pasts and gymnastic displays? That sort of thing appealed to Changez’s enormous vanity, but Chamcha wanted none of it. The point was, the school wasn’t budging; the gift was useless, and probably an administrative headache as well. He wrote to his father refusing the offer. It was the last time Changez Chamchawala tried to give him anything. Home receded from the prodigal son.
‘I never forget a faface,’ Sisodia was saying. ‘You’re mimi Mimi’s friend. The Bostan susurvivor. Knew it the moment I saw you papa panic at the gaga gate. Hope you’re not feefeeling too baba bad.’ Saladin, his heart sinking, shook his head, no, I’m fine, honestly. Sisodia, gleaming, knee-like, winked hideously at a passing stewardess and summoned more whisky. ‘Such a shashame about Gibreel and his lady,’ Sisodia went on. ‘Such a nice name that she had, alla alla Alleluia. What a temper on that boy, what a jeajealous tata type. Hard for a momodern gaga girl. They bus bust up.’ Saladin retreated, once again, into a pretence of sleep. I have only just recovered from the past. Go, go away.
He had formally declared his recovery complete only five weeks earlier, at the wedding of Mishal Sufyan and Hanif Johnson. After the death of her parents in the Shaandaar fire Mishal had been assailed by a terrible, illogical guilt that caused her mother to appear to her in dreams and admonish her: ‘If only you’d passed the fire extinguisher when I asked. If only you’d blown a little harder. But you never listen to what I say and your lungs are so cigarette-rotten that you could not blow out one candle let alone a burning house.’ Under the severe eye of her mother’s ghost Mishal moved out of Hanif’s apartment, took a room in a place with three other women, applied for and got Jumpy Joshi’s old job at the sports centre, and fought the insurance companies until they paid up. Only when the Shaandaar was ready to reopen under her management did Hind Sufyan’s ghost agree that it was time to be off to the after-life; whereupon Mishal telephoned Hanif and asked him to marry her. He was too surprised to reply, and had to pass the telephone to a colleague who explained that the cat had got Mr Johnson’s tongue, and accepted Mishal’s offer on the dumbstruck lawyer’s behalf. So everybody was recovering from the tragedy; even Anahita, who had been obliged to live with a stiflingly old-fashioned aunt, managed to look pleased at the wedding, perhaps because Mishal had promised her her own rooms in the renovated Shaandaar Hotel. Mishal had asked Saladin to be her chief witness in recognition of his attempt to save her parents’ life, and on their way to the registry office in Pinkwalla’s van (all charges against the DJ and his boss, John Maslama, had been dropped for lack of evidence) Chamcha told the bride: ‘Today feels like a new start for me, too; perhaps for all of us.’ In his own case there had been by-pass surgery, and the difficulty of coming to terms with so many deaths, and nightmare visions of being metamorphosed once more into some sort of sulphurous, cloven-hoof demon. He was also, for a time, professionally crippled by a shame so profound that, when clients finally did begin to book him once more and ask for one of his voices, for example the voice of a frozen pea or a glove-puppet packet of sausages, he felt the memory of his telephonic crimes welling up in his throat and strangling the impersonations at birth. At Mishal’s wedding, however, he suddenly felt free. It was quite a ceremony, largely because the young couple could not refrain from kissing one another throughout the procedure, and had to be urged by the registrar (a pleasant young woman who also exhorted the guests not to drink too much that day if they planned to drive) to hurry up and get through the words before it was time for the next wedding party to arrive. Afterwards at the Shaandaar the kissing continued, the kisses becoming gradually longer and more explicit, until finally the guests had the feeling that they were intruding on a private moment, and slipped quietly away leaving Hanif and Mishal to enjoy a passion so engulfing that they did not even notice their friends’ departure; they remained oblivious, too, of the small crowd of children that gathered outside the windows of the Shaandaar Café to watch them. Chamcha, the last guest to leave, did the newlyweds the favour of pulling down the blinds, much to the children’s annoyance; and strolled off down the rebuilt High Street feeling so light on his feet that he actually gave a kind of embarrassed skip.
Nothing is forever, he thought beyond closed eyelids somewhere over Asia Minor. Maybe unhappiness is the continuum through which a human life moves, and joy just a series of blips, of islands in the stream. Or if not unhappiness, then at least melancholy … These broodings were interrupted by a lusty snore from the seat beside him. Mr Sisodia, whisky-glass in hand, was asleep.
The producer was evidently a hit with the stewardesses. They fussed around his sleeping person, detaching the glass from his fingers and removing it to a place of safety, spreading a blanket over his lower half, and trilling admiringly over his snoring head: ‘Doesn’t he look poochie? Just a little cuteso, I swear!’ Chamcha was reminded unexpectedly of the society ladies of Bombay patting him on the head during his mother’s little soirées, and fought back tears of surprise. Sisodia actually looked faintly obscene; he had removed his spectacles before falling asleep, and their absence gave him an oddly naked appearance. To Chamcha’s eyes he resembled nothing so much as an outsize Shiva lingam. Maybe that accounted for his popularity with the ladies.
Flicking through the magazines and newspapers he was offered by the stewardesses, Saladin chanced upon an old acquaintance in trouble. Hal Valance’s sanitized Aliens Show had flopped badly in the United States and was being taken off the air. Worse still, his advertising agency and its subsidiaries had been swallowed by an American leviathan, and it was probable that Hal was on the way out, conquered by the transatlantic dragon he had set out to tame. It was hard to feel sorry for Valance, unemployed and down to his last few millions, abandoned by his beloved Mrs Torture and her pals, relegated to the limbo reserved for fallen favourites, along with busted entrepreneur-boffins and insider-dealing financiers and renegade ex-ministers; but Chamcha, flying to his father’s deathbed, was in so heightened an emotional condition that he managed a valedictory lump in the throat even for wicked Hal. At whose pool table, he wondered vaguely, is Baby playing now?
In India, the war between men and women showed no sign of abating. In the Indian Express he read an account of the latest ‘bride suicide’. The husband, Prajapati, is absconding. On the next page, in the weekly small-ad marriage market, the parents of young men still demanded, and the parents of young women proudly offered, brides of ‘wheatish’ complexions. Chamcha remembered Zeeny’s frie
nd, the poet Bhupen Gandhi, speaking of such things with passionate bitterness. ‘How to accuse others of being prejudiced when our own hands are so dirty?’ he had declaimed. ‘Many of you in Britain speak of victimization. Well. I have not been there, I don’t know your situation, but in my personal experience I have never been able to feel comfortable about being described as a victim. In class terms, obviously, I am not. Even speaking culturally, you find here all the bigotries, all the procedures associated with oppressor groups. So while many Indians are undoubtedly oppressed, I don’t think any of us are entitled to lay claim to such a glamorous position.’
‘Trouble with Bhupen’s radical critiques,’ Zeeny had remarked, ‘is that reactionaries like Salad baba here just love to lap them up.’
An armaments scandal was raging; had the Indian government paid kickbacks to middlemen, and then gone in for a cover-up? Vast sums of money were involved, the Prime Minister’s credibility had been weakened, but Chamcha couldn’t be bothered with any of it. He was staring at the fuzzy photograph, on an inside page, of indistinct, bloated shapes floating down-river in large numbers. In a north Indian town there had been a massacre of Muslims, and their corpses had been dumped in the water, where they awaited the ministrations of some twentieth-century Gaffer Hexam. There were hundreds of bodies, swollen and rancid; the stench seemed to rise off the page. And in Kashmir a once-popular Chief Minister who had ‘made an accommodation’ with the Congress-I had shoes hurled at him during the Eid prayers by irate groups of Islamic fundamentalists. Communalism, sectarian tension, was omnipresent: as if the gods were going to war. In the eternal struggle between the world’s beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining ground by the day. Sisodia’s voice intruded on these morose thoughts. The producer had woken up to see the photograph from Meerut staring up from Chamcha’s fold-out table. ‘Fact is,’ he said without any of his usual bonhomie, ‘religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.’